Chiptune Memories
by KendrixTermina
Summary: Based on and inspired by the eponymous album by the very underrated artist Lain Volta Trzaska, also known as 'she'. I listened to it soon after finishing series 9 and it just really seemed to resonate with the storyline and whouffle in general, and so, a ff idea started growing in my head...
1. Prologue

" _Don't worry, I'll remember-"_

Or so he says, but he is already stumbling, his knees giving in not for any fault of their own, but due to erratic, insufficient signaling from upstairs:

Can't access a file or program while it's being changed, 'please wait and don't press the power key' and all that. Consciousness dims to erratic flickers.

Think, _think,_ and do it quickly.

No point wasting time in a futile effort to remain upright when the real showdown is going on inside his skull – but right in here, the lights are going out, and the threads of thought slip from his grasp even as he tries to reach for them: Update in Progress.

Except it's not quite an 'upgrade', not an improvement except in the most cynical of ways – He made a rash, emotional decision in the heat of the moment, a desperate to escape the pain bursting his chest open, and now he's paying the price for it, and all the others that lead him into this moment like beasts strung onto a Rosary of penitence.

And perhaps that's the very thing that them both to push this accursed trigger, some twisted-up need to punish themselves for the sins of their past this a farcical reenactment of a Shakespearean Suicide Pact, to escape from pain and regret and drink from that underworld river without even leaving their lives at the tollgates, insofar as either of them could even be said to _have_ such a thing as a life anymore -

Just moments ago, the memory of **her** felt like a burning, excruciating agony that should surely shatter his chest if he did not throw it overboard, but that was operating under the assumption that he could never be free of it even if he wanted to – Now that it was actively fading from his grasp, it felt like one of the most precious jewels to relinquish, not just the memory of a very special person and a dear friend who had shared his journey, an example of all that which he valued the most, but the long-sought answers pertaining to mysteries of his own life-

Perhaps that was exactly why he deserved this, why he ought to be broken for his Pride in this exact way, but looking at **her** face as she struggled to form the smile that had been his last request, he could not stave off the conclusion that whatever it was _he_ deserved, **she** was owed better than this – and once he'd formed this thought, he resigned himself to the solemn obligation to fight this in any way he could.


	2. By Your Side

**I. By your Side**

 _Look at us now, travelers through time **  
**Pictures and sounds, Pixels turn into lines **  
**Let's never forget the echoes of our time **  
**In your memories take my hand to the other side ****_

 _Can you believe time has passed us by **  
**Like a fading satellite **  
**Let it be me standing by your side **  
**Make the feeling alright ****_

 _Moving too fast, fading beyond all doubt **  
**Trying to last, time is running out **  
**It's never to late to turn it around **  
**Remember love in your mind ****_

 _All the dreams it took away **  
**and ourselves still age away **  
**As the end gets closer **  
**Come take my hand **  
**I'll be always by your side ****_

 _Can you believe **  
**Time has passed us by **  
**Like a fading satellite ****_

 _Standing by your side_

….

Focus now.

Every thought he can grasp might slip into permanent oblivion the moment he let's go, and what an irony if he should fail; Quick thinking was kind of his thing, it had served him without fail so many times that he'd come to rely on it when it came to protecting others, but when it came to this most personal battle of purely selfish interest, it might not save him, and with that, he understands just what he was about to do her, and why she so adamantly refused, indeed, it became increasingly hard to consider any other point of view – He should have known her better than this, and in his heart of hearts, he did, but fear of losing her had clouded his sight and even twisted his view of the very person he so treasured.

And if there could be an upside to this, it's that no matter what he thought before, in this split second of clarity he's glad that she hadn't been the one to pull the short end of the stick, and that it wasn't her lying on this floor, holding on to the seams of her mind.

Is this poetic justice then?

And this, too, occurs to him: Will he remember _this_ , even? This very moment? Were the memory retention centers of his brain still working orderly enough to retain an imprint of this, and if they were, how would his mind be able to parse this moment with so many holes in it, so many dangling pointers to things that were about to be ripped out? How would he tell anything was missing, and, if empty spaces made themselves known, how would they be evidence of anything? How different would it be from other rambly incoherent thoughts he no longer recalled in detail, simply because they weren't sufficiently novel to leave an impression?

He can still see her, at this very moment, bent over him with an anguished face, but her words are getting harder to process, and recognition of her movements is only coming in waves.

If it was somehow possible to stay awake through the entire process and keep looking at her the entire time, it is possible that the image itself would remain in his mind's eye as long the light kept hitting his eyes – but all the while, all meaning would crumble away from it, scattered into its component particles much like matter disintegrating into smaller and smaller fractions, until only a mere stimulus remained.

He experienced her as characteristic sounds, splotches of color and the feel of her mind against his, and only through the trappings of his many senses had he ever been able to perceive her and craft a representation of her inside of his mind through which he had been able to know her.

While she was in his presence, she was certainly making an impression on his eyes, ears, and skin, but its exact nature changed from moment to moment and circumstance to circumstance, the raw image focused on the back of his mind was a different one depending on the lighting, her getup and the perspective from which he saw her – her voice was just another sound mixed in with a backdrop of noise, the atoms that composed her body was no different from the soup of particles in her surroundings and ultimately not that sharply distinct.

It was only because the circuits of his brain could pick her out from the background as a distinct entity that he could even perceive her, because they labeled, distinguished and recognized her as the same being even when his senses weren't perceiving her at all – the idea of her was made of colors that formed contours, contours that formed features and features that distinguished a person, of sounds that were parsed into words and words that were woven into meanings, it was the central junction that tied all these seemingly disparate inputs into an interconnected whole, and it was itself linked to numerous memories and concepts of meaning, it was an integral node in the networks that formed the story of his life, pathways that triggered feelings and laid the foundations for beliefs.

Without it, her face would be like a whole library's worth of mankind's finest masterpieces would be to an illiterate caveman – even if he could possibly fathom that the symbols could be words and that the words could be language, without the necessary background education of any clue of the complex cultural context being references, he would still struggle to grasp even a fraction of the knowledge and beauty contained therein.

There might be valuable insights in these books, many of them most intimately related to the man himself and the condition of his living, but without the means to excavate them from the pages, they would be inaccessible to him – for millennia, mankind had looked up at the sky, and for millennia, it had contained information about the expansion of the universe, but it was only in the 20th century that humanity had amassed enough prior knowledge to read that secret from the velvet pages of the sky.

And likewise, it had taken _him_ twenty centuries to make sense of this presence that had always been in his life, but now, it was dissolving back into shapes and concepts and a foam of white noise, until he would look up at her to see only raw and unprocessed data.

He might process it anew, spot cascades of familiar patterns and assemble them into 'a human' who 'looks sad', into a distinct, permanent entity that didn't disappear when it slipped out of sight – he would once again see her, but he would never _see_ her, not ever again.

He could already feel the recognition slipping away and fading, thoughts going into odd, wonky directions as in the beginning of a dream, like streaks of paint dissolving in water -

No. Nononono. _Focus._

….

And all the while his thoughts were racing and speeding up and down their paths in search for the means not to forget her, the parts of him that produced feelings could not comprehend how that which he feared could ever be possible.

She was such a unique and integral part of his life, one of the very few parts of it that had ever been a constant – so how could she ever be gone from it?

 **Of course** she could be, his mind would chime in, times pass, lives end and her imprint in his mind was simply a semantic equivalent of some structure inside his physical brain, which was made up of atoms like everything else, and therefore just as malleable and just as continuously interwoven with all his surroundings. It was merely a highly sophisticated picture of her, an imperfect facsimile of her as he understood her. Bash him in the head, and _**all**_ of his understandings would be nothing but dust.

Meaning was simply something that he had assigned to it, another layer of interpretation, a confabulation concocted so he could convince himself that his existence made sense, because he was nothing _but_ thought, a fleeting emergent occurrence of believing himself to be what he thought he was.

 **Fool** , he chided himself, as if your puny little brain was all that important. Try as he might, the crevices inside his skull were not yet an exact, accurate map of the entire universe, and while any number of records might be gone from its record, that did not mean that they were gone from reality.

What he did not know anymore, he could learn again, and while the new picture would not be identical to the first, it would be as good a reflection of what it was meant to describe as the first ever was.

And in a sense, that thought was comforting, that she and every single moment they had were still somewhere out there in time, even if they were now inaccessible to him.

The reality, the mysterium he had been chasing would stay right where it was, and like many other mysteries, he would continue to chase after it for as long as he lived, simply because it was there, because it was real, and because it would not leave him in peace, it's simple existence to taunting to be ignored -

The search for answers was not always successful, and even when was, there was not always a reward, no bell ringing to announce that you've definitely figured it out this time, and no confirmation that your insights would not be disproved by some unknown circumstance you could never have hoped to fathom, but even so, he had no choice but to pursue the truth, because it was the only final reality, and whatever revelations the future might bring, they would not change reality, just his perception of it.

The truth was true whether he knew of it or not, and his existence right now was already in accordance with the truth, whatever it might turn out to be – in this case, the truth was that _she_ had existed.

Even if she were gone from his mind, she could never be gone from the world, and the best proof of that was his own being here - He could not have existed without her, he wouldn't be here, he would not have had the reason to go and do the things he did.

In short, nothing in his life would remotely make sense – and perhaps that was exactly why he had so struggled to accept that time could have passed them by: She had always been there, until suddenly she wasn't, and he couldn't picture a world without her.

He realized, bitterly, that it was a _past_ he was now grasping to save, because a past was all he had left. That instant she had spent immersed in his time stream, that had been his entire life, and the only blip in that long time span during which he would be able to repay his debt without a foregone conclusion was now over – in fact, it had been over a long, long time ago, as Ashildr had only just reminded him.

Their journey together was now a part of the past that could only be found memory, because he had seen the last of it and no new days would ever be added to their number, and now, because of his foolishness, even that last refuge might be taken from him, even now as he longed for that past more than anything else because it was now the only place where they could be together.

….

How _could_ he forget her, though?

Not in any poetical or philosophical sense, either; How did the actual process of forgetting physically happen?

Yes of course with a 'memory wipe', but what does that even mean? It does not literally 'wipe' anything the way 'baby wipes' do, although the language used certainly codifies a way of thinking of it, of 'wiping' the memory away by erasing the information from a space or vessel designed to contain it, like wiping a blackboard, or a computer's hard drive.

It was an example of how the advent and proliferation of universal simulators such as Turing-complete computers would influence our thinking even beyond the application of the machines themselves – their main advantage is precisely their great universality: They can simulate anything, so for us the programmers, there can be a reverse tendency to imagine everything in the format of such a simulation, as a classical Von-Neumann-Machine with a variable stored program, an executing computational unit, a temporary workspace and a long-term storage.

One example of that powerful tool and it's application pervading our thinking is often seen in modern Super Hero comics with the idea of powers as programs that can be transferred, stolen, deactivated, copied or combined, and this can make sense for some superpowers, but not so much when their origin is established to be not some singular mechanism that can be copied or duplicated, something that ought to be an intrinsic part of your main character's physiology that would require a multitude of complex invasive changes to alter -

But fundamentally, it's yet another example of the hammer principle: When all you have is a computer, everything starts looking like a program, only that it goes one step further because, by the very nature of programmable computers, almost everything _can_ be made into or duplicated by a computer, but that doesn't mean that it _is_ one.

The brain, be it Human or Time Lord, is _not_ a Von-Neumann-Machine; There might be some beings out there whose brains _are_ , but generally speaking such a mechanism would be unlikely to be produced by evolution because of the precision it requires to function at its most basic level, a precision that could perhaps be found at the end of an optimization process, but never at its beginning in the squishy messy chaos of biological processes.

Furthermore, as a consequence of quantum physics, the chemistry and physics they are based on are inherently stochastic in nature; In machines, engineers have worked around this by employing redundancy, but nature is not an engineer designing its work toward a predetermined goal, but an artisan molding their work from clay seeing where inspiration will take them, always working with what they already have and building every step on the process upon the preexisting one:

Both processes optimize and refine preexisting conditions and mechanisms to their logical conclusions, but while the engineer adapt the world to suit their need, nature adapts itself to the world as it finds it, making use of the givens in its environment rather than finding ways to work around them.

Which is to say that in terms of computational models, the brain has less in common with a Von-Neumann-Machine and more with a Boltzmann-Machine in which information would be stored based on the distribution of probabilities – though of course even that model would be a simplification since it assumes individual units ('neurons', so to speak) with relatively uniform properties and a fixed geometry – in a real human brain, almost every single neuron has subtly different firing patterns and changes in the 'wiring' are a driving force in the learning process.

But even so, the fundamental mechanism of higher thought in organic creatures (and many advanced AIs) seems to be a probabilistic one – In the case of mammalian earth lifeforms, for example, the instrument of higher thought is the neocortex, the newest layer of the brain which, in humans, makes up for 80% of their total brain matter. Though different regions of it can typically be assigned to particular types of functionality, it's overall makeup is actually surprisingly uniform, whether the area one is observed is responsible for recognizing basic images or abstract higher-level objects – hence, why one area can take over function of a different one in cases of damage or impairment: Though different areas may be optimized for different tasks, their basic algorithm is the same: Neurons are organized in distinct, layered columns of about a hundred which fire upon the recognition of a particular pattern.

Furthermore, these individual pattern recognizers are arranged and connected in a hierarchical manner, where the mechanism for recognizing lower-level patterns are linked to those for higher-order patterns that they constitute a part of. While reading a text, the mind recognizes edges, which it then uses to recognize letters, which are used to recognize words, which are used to recognize the objects they represent which are then aligned into complex higher-level meanings such as irony – each recognizer on each level 'fires' when a certain threshold of incoming inputs is met, wherein the different inputs are given different weights.

This is how the mind can recognize patterns even when they are slightly altered or only partially present, and how it can identify different variants and manifestations of the same thing, such as an object seen from different perspectives under different lighting conditions, or sequences of actions in which some steps can be optional (by unifying them on a higher level of abstraction) – the adjustment of those weights and thresholds and the linking between levels of context is what constitutes learning, but the thresholds can also be adjusted in a situational manner – when parts of a pattern are already detected, the threshold for its remaining parts is lowered, whether its the last letter in a word or the typical outcome of a plot twist – and that is the mechanism behind another fundamental characteristic of intelligence, the ability to expect and predict future outcomes.

It was this network with its architecture, connections weights and thresholds that encoded a person's thought patterns, their discernment, understanding, and way of thinking, including the modes of action applied to social behavior and ethics.

Unlike in our earlier example with the Von-Neumann-Computer, CPU, working memory, long-term storage and the program being executed were one and the same and intricately interconnected – to remember something and to know what it was, to consciously think of it and to recognize it where essentially the same process: Every event would adjust the thresholds all over the networks and influence how we act and think and understand things, and every time the recognizer associated with a memory 'fires' it might be being readjusted and linked to new regions, if not changed, then at least recontextualized.

His Memory contained not just recollections of the past, but conclusions for the future, lessons about the nature of the world, conclusions about general laws and changes to his very being and the criteria according to which he made his decisions – removing Clara from all that would be like removing a part of himself.

And in a way, this topsy-turvy yarn ball of connections where thinking of one moment could spark recollections of many moments like it and where every butterfly-wing-flap of a thought could send ripples to the whole was a much more accurate reflection of the timey-wimey ball of reality than the linear film reel it was sometimes mistaken for.

There was no discreet 'memory space' from which immutable record of individual events from which they could be "wiped" without altering the whole because the whole was one with the events that molded it.

Sure, there were critical junctures in the infrastructure of the brain without which the process couldn't correctly function, such the hippocampus – damage it and new memories could no longer be formed nor reinforced transferred to long-term storage, but that was akin to formatting a hard disk by deleting the registry, tearing the index out of a dictionary so that the contents could no longer be retrieved, nor new ones filed away by giving them addresses – the actual mechanism of the hippocampus was exceedingly simple and indeed one of the first ones that human scientists had been able to duplicate with technology – it administered memories mainly through pointers into the neocortex, or, in animals that don't have one, directly from the senses.

The more a recognized pattern was reactivated the easier it was triggered, and the stronger the corresponding connections became, and the more redundancies there would be, more individual recognizers devoted to spotting and recognizing the pattern in all its forms. By contrast, something that was never referenced again would fade with time, no further pointers would be created and, in time, that particular recognizer might be repurposed for something else, and that's how one forgot banal everyday details that one would never need again -

But clearly, that was not possible for strongly significant memories which were linked and gave meaning and context to many other concept and experiences and had become embedded into the very core of who the person was.

One could have physically destroyed the corresponding neurons, or perhaps somehow reset them and their connections to their newly-minted state upon forming in the last stages of a developing fetus, but that would have disrupted the entire network, and diminished the total amount of connectivity and perhaps available recognizes – in short, it would be tantamount to irreversible brain damage, and the more entrenched the memory, the more devastating its removal. Small losses could be compensated for because of the redundancy with which important concepts were represented, but any memory wipe that literally "wiped" would destroy the subject's coherence before long.

But there was another kind of "forgetting", beyond brachial damage or the fading and filtering of insignificant or insufficiently retained details, not so much the loss but the 'misplacing' of information:

Because the basic architecture of the mind was a hierarchical network, each memory or concept must be 'reached' through others connected to it – one memory triggers another and then another in a chain or cascade of recollections, but even if a memory is there, it may not 'activate' until the corresponding triggers are seen or thought of elsewhere in the network:

That is also why we have the difference between active and passive recall, the question to answer something when asked about it or prompted versus the ability to recognize it upon seeing it – in the context of language, this could be seen as roughly equivalent between recognizing a word upon hearing it and being able to actively hear it.

This is why when we try to remember something, we go through possible things related to it that could 'trigger' the desired connection to fire, and why breaking something down into parts or relating it to subjects you already know well – creating new, swifter and shorter link chains – can help one to recall it better.

How often were students unable to answer a question posed by their teacher, only to recognize the subject as well as the circumstances under which they first heard of it when the solution was revealed?

A memory that is linked to only a few others is harder to access than one that is well-connected, and even a well-connected one's response can depend on very specific triggers.

The most used, most easy-to trigger ones then become part of the default responses, the most relied-upon patterns, activating practically by themselves – the ego, or central organizing principle of the mind.

And these connections in the networks of our minds are not just excitatory, that is, triggering activation; Activity can be inhibited or regulated downward, too. Indeed, one of the greatest differing qualities between humans and simpler mammals is the prominence of significantly more and more complex inhibitory networks, particularly in more novel areas such as what would be the frontal lobe in humans.

They grant us the ability to regulate and monitor our own thinking, to organize and coordinate it, to change it even, in other words: To be aware of ourselves, and to have our own will, our own influence on what to reinforce or suppress beyond what the environment puts in, and an existence as the thing that which perceives itself doing the choosing, exiting and suppressing, that which we call consciousness.

This mechanisms and others like it have enabled self-aware creatures around the universe to do incredible things, to think about their own thinking, know their own knowledge and ask questions to fill any holes it may detect, but it is a very new, emergent, imperfect property. A mind that could organize itself was just as liable to get itself into a twist.

The organizing principle makes a discernment as to which inputs from the rest of the network are to be suppressed or reinforced, and it is this filter that turns the registering and reflecting of mere data into a subjective experience and decision making – It is all that we, as conscious beings, really are.

But at the same time, it can get stuck in too rigid, too narrow and too inflexible patterns, and disregard and filter out crucial parts of what goes on in the layers upon layers of brain accumulated by evolution. To focus and recognize some things, we must choose to focus them over others, to exist and be one thing, it follows that we cannot be others, at least not at the same time. It is too easy to filter out things that the self deems inconvenient, or that simply do not speak its language, sitting far away from it in the dephts of the network.

One example would be experiences from early childhood that we had not yet learned to order, or did not fit with the principles that our later, more mature mind would employ for the purpose of ordering, such as language.

Another are repressed traumatic experiences – to begin with, we tend to experience them while we are functioning in 'survival mode', thinking in more primal, sense-oriented ways than we usually do, and because they and the networks of implications we connect to them might not - the connection is there, and it is strong, but what has become so reinforced is the tendency to avoid and inhibit that connection from firing.

Both these examples are not gone from the network as such – indeed childhood experiences or trauma can impact us for our entire lives and influence our behavior and the lens through which we view the world. It is simply that we cannot directly access them the way we usually would.

A similar effect can be seen under the influence of certain drugs; They cause connections to fire outside of their usual organizedpatternss, which is why they can bring up long buried memories "distant" from the main "highways" of the mind that are usually followed by default, and cause you to think in ways in which you otherwise wouldn't, leading to people reporting more creative thoughts and more honest self-reflection. They can also make you temporarily forget who you are because your now less organized brain can no longer rely on the 'default pathways' to 'find' such information. You may feel as if you are becoming one with the universe because the mechanism that sorts between 'you' and 'not you' is working differently; What actually "merges" are your _mental representation_ of yourself and the universe, and since it is only through that mental representation of the world that you experience it, it feel like merging with the world proper.

And the same might be going on in dreams, at least before one realized that they even _were_ dreams, for what were dreams except yet another kind of thinking in which the usual organization of thought was not fully active? Hence, why one could only remember dreams if they woke up halfway through and made sure to think them over in one's waking mind, creating connections to its default networks so that they could be found and reinforced.

Bottom line: The organization of your memories, and the filtering done by the mechanism which you call your 'self`' also influences how and if you remember them.

And once a mechanism is known to exist, of course, an engineer's mind will find a way to exploit it; from the small difference in how air flows around a curved versus a straight surface, the human intellect created the whole world of aviation, and with the knowledge of how the organization of the mind affects recall, the Time Lords had a long, long time to figure out the means to cause such a process in a deliberate, controlled manner.

A skilled telepath could feed a mind the necessary cues and triggers that would create suppression or block of a memory, reinforce the inhibition of a connection, and it will. A clever neuroscientist could devise a contraption that could cut out the middleman and more smoothly, effectively, reliably and consummately than any messy natural process.

That, then, is what is about to happen to him, and why the proper term is 'neuro _block_ ' rather than memory wipe.

The networks in his brain that are allotted to recognizing Clara, the archives that connect everything she is to him and describe every bit of her by connecting to the respective experiences and ideas, the space devoted to her, of which he's certain there must be quite a lot, are going to be suppressed.

Because they are a foundational part of him, they cannot be made to disappear without destroying him also, but they will become like a walled-in room in the blueprint of a house, or, indeed, like the very trap street on which she was taken from him, disconnected from the chains of his memories; The room will be there, as will the adjustments to all other weights and threshold caused by their addition, and as with a memory from early childhood, the imprint will always be there, but there will be no more doors through which he could step inside, no more links through which they could be reached from outside.

He will think 'valor', and a great number of faces of brave and courageous individuals will appear, but the link that would lead to Clara's will be prevented from firing.

He might see a round face with wide brown eyes and tiny dimples at the sides, but they won't activate the circuit that would reach a conclusion, and fire off so much, much more.

She and everything related to her would become a remote island in his mind, a world onto its own with little to no direct connections to the rest of his world, and a part of him, the part that yearned and craved and screamed for her, would fall into a deep, deep slumber with only its occasional, distant dreams ever bubbling up to cross the paths of his conscious mind.

But if his mind was a network, then this wretched process was basically tantamount to executing an algorithm on it, nothing more than a kind of weighted graph search. Input "Clara", see what fires, do some manner of inversion operation on the edge weights swapping activation for inhibition, and recursively apply the same on all daughter nodes in proportion to how strongly they would fire in relation to "Clara".

The process would wash down the streets of his mind like a tidal bore, iterating through the chapters of their story and concealing its footprints, from the Dalek Asylum to Victorian London, from Ankhaten to the cold war submarine and everything in between, until it would have made its way to the trap street to part the two of them once more –

The stronger the connection, the harder it would be silenced, but there must be a specificity cutoff somewhere to tell it where to stop, lest it wipe out every word or concept or feature which he had ever connected with the thought of Clara in any way.

And at this point he was beginning to feel that he had seen this somewhere before in a movie, but at the same time, he finally saw the way out, plain and distinct as chalk on a blackboard.

The links would go, but the information would stay – the strong links that is, the default, most distinct ones that he relied upon, the bits that struck out to him the most, but adjacent to those largest, most significant episodes, next to the first few things he would think of when he tried to recall each significant event of their journey, was a weave of smaller moments and less prominent details, other ways he could have chosen to describe and conceptualize those same events and weave them into a narrative, all the in-between, all the coincidences.

If this mindwipe was going to 'wipe' the main streets, then hew was going to have to follow the alleyways, to carve up new paths and reinforce smaller connections, to pull out new ropes to tie them to the rest of himself in new ways, before they slipped from his grasp forever -

It was, in short, exactly like trying to remember a dream, like writing it down a dream right after waking up, to go over the stations and images of its story so that they would be linked to his waking thoughts.

….

" _Time doesn't pass. The passage of time is an illusion, and life is the magician. Because life only lets you see one day at a time. You remember being alive yesterday, you hope you're going to be alive tomorrow, so it feels like you're travelling from one to the other._

 _But nobody's moving anywhere. Movies don't really move. They're just pictures, lots and lots of pictures. All of them still, none of them moving. Just frozen moments._

 _But if you experience those pictures one after the other, then everything comes alive._

 _Imagine if time all happened at once. Every moment of your life laid out around you like a city. Streets full of buildings made of days._

 _The day you were born, the day you die. The day you fall in love, the day that love ends. A whole city built from triumph and heartbreak and boredom and laughter and cutting your toenails. It's the best place you will ever be._

 _Time is a structure relative to ourselves. Time is the space made by our lives where we stand together, forever."_

...

In the city of his mind, in this World Unturning, there are many twists and turns and alleyways, many hidden places and many wandering ghosts, footprints of people he used to be, and of people who would dwell in his heart for eternity.

It was a chaotic crisscross of pathways, nooks and crannies not unlike some old European city, expanding from the center in layers of buildings and styles or archetypes from different eras, reflecting different easthetics and many movements of thoughts, showing a different face to travelers depending on wether they chose to arrive by boat or train or car, full of newest outgrowths and corners that had been forgotten as different industries had risen and faded, riddled with scars where wars had torn holes that had since been filled with new growth, or left as it as a warning for generations to come, with hidden canals and rivers hidden beneath the ground, older iterations buried turned into cellars, tube stations and sewers burying into the ground.

There were walls and battlements and concert halls and plazas, and at its gates, it all comes back to snow, sinking down gently in iridescent glitter and sparkles, covering the ground like a new, fresh canvas.

At the gates, in that place of transition where everything ends and begins, he recalls the apparition of a tiny, red haired girl neatly packaged in winter clothes, with her little scarf and a fuzzy hat and an itty bitty suitcase.

He doesn't quite know why his thoughts came here, his inner programmer feels tempted to mumble something about dangling pointers, but now that he _is_ here, he recalls with fondness how this little girl remained who she is and kept alive the story of her life even when huge chunks of it had disappeared into oblivion, how she once cried for a boy who had never existed and how she shared the wisdom she learned from a mother she never had, particularly on the subject of apples...

And her apparition nods at him with a smile when he recalls what he told her once upon a long time:

"If something can be remembered, then it _can_ come back."

With a fiendish, furtive glance, she gives him an almost conspiratory wink, and he understands quite well what his old friend means:

This was the right answer. It all begins in the snow.


	3. (Clarity)

_(Clarity)_

 _High dive into frozen waves  
Where the past comes back to life  
Fight fear for the selfish pain  
And it's worth it every time  
Hold still right before we crash  
'Cause we both know how this ends  
Our clock ticks till it breaks your glass  
And I drown in you again_

 _'Cause you are the piece of me  
I wish I didn't need  
Chasing relentlessly  
Still fight and I don't know why_

 _If our love is tragedy why are you my remedy  
If our love's insanity why are you my clarity_

….

It all begins in the snow, on a snowy day a long, long time ago, and back then, he was feeling a whole lot like he was feeling right now.

He'd felt this way before, and for all the fire and fury of his protestations, he knew that he would probably feel this way again -

Which only fueled his stubborn refusal to go about his way like he somehow always knew he would, precisely _because_ he knew.

Of course, Vashtra knew too, and that just irritated him all the more -

He believes he might have gone out of his way to be just marginally awful to her, Jenny and Strax, just to prove his own point, not to them, but to himself.

That explained his behavior, but he'd be damned if he ever allowed himself to believe that it excused it, but the more he disgusted himself with his sour, acerbic brooding, the more he could convince himself that his choice had been right.

As for Vashtra and the others, he could only say that they had proven themselves true friends toward good times and bad; he'd satisfy their appeals to reason just enough to avoid being confronted, give them conditions and concessions just to get their well-meaning concern off his back, but it was all told with the aim to return to stewing in his malcontent, and the more patient his friends proved themselves to be, the harder he tried to wear out that patience of theirs so that they would finally give up on him and leave him to his disillusion.

Once, a long, long time ago, when he had to part with Donna and Rose, he used to be full of dramatic rage and self-absorbed lamentation;

Now, after many, many centuries not a single one of which managed to dull the ache, freshly deprived of the closest thing he's had to a family in a long, long time, he cannot even muster the energy to do _that._

All that is left is a sense of coldness and dearth; of being dried up, bled out and spent.

For a while, he manages to convince himself that he is done with the world, and that there is no trace of any soft or delicate feeling left inside of him.

Just a few months later, he would leave his snowy hideaway on the clouds in an excited frenzy.

….

A woman is trying to meet him.

The waitress who informed him of this just before he would depart to the Dalek Asylum could not have known just how true that statement of hers would turn out to be;

Someone is trying to meet him, and it's not so much the Dalek Puppet sent to collect him, but someone he would encounter beneath the surface of the planet, someone who's been trying to get his attention for his entire life.

A woman is trying to meet him, and now for the first time, he is trying to meet her too.

….

Madness consumes him.

It follows him into his dreams and chases him from his slumber covered in sweat; Fever burns through mind, body and soul like a fever, and no one who would voice their conclusions could truly understand -

He is not _like_ this, he never _burnt_ like this, not even in his tender blushing youth; Even then it was, at best, an awkward, careful reluctant affair – He's used to being the outsider, the rational one, the stranger, the cold, calculating observer, the remote, other being, and now he find himself standing here like Romeo on the day of the masquerade, asking "Did my hearts love till now?"

He doesn't doubt that they did, and yet this feeling feels new, and it would not leave him in peace.

Normally, his rational mind would be providing the voice of reason, but this time, reason couldn't sit still either, racing white hot with theories and speculations asking "How can it be"?

How could he encounter the exact same person twice, under wholly different circumstances? How can it possibly be her?

He's lost so much, been played and fooled and disappointed so many times that he cannot quite believe it, how could something so convenient just simply turn out to be?

What sort of trick or trap could this be to play his hopes in such a cruel way? Where is the catch, the inevitable crashing and burning?

Vexed by a driving need for answers, insatiable curiosity mixes with longing, and the faint memory of the taste of her lips, and how she went and took the lead on him, her courage, brilliance, her caring and determination, her telling silly stories to frightened children much as he had none too long ago.

Why does he have to encounter her now, when he can no longer simply trust and observe the seeming miracle, now that he cannot help but wait for the trap to snap shut?

Why now, as he had almost been used to giving up?

Why does she have to come to him _now_ , now that he is _this_ , bitter and old and dried and cynical and barely able to withstand this feeling?

He can barely contain it, and bits of it leak out onto paintings, songs and poems and half-abandoned sketches, but what business does he have thinking in sonnets?

He covers diary pages in her name and sits between old tomes and candles, his pale face resting in his hands, his thoughts and feelings swirling in heavy urgency as he struggles to divine her meaning, wondering why the universe sees it fit to taunt him in such a way.

How can he face her _now,_ and how were his old, decrepit hearts even still capable of such desperate _wanting?_

Hold it right there, 'old decrepit hearts'.

He'd be damned to hell and back if he wasn't still pretty spry for a millennium and a half.

He catches a glimpse of himself on one of the TARDIS console's instrument boards and he thinks, 'not too bad', he finds himself adjusting his glasses, straightening up his bowtie and making sure that his hair is in order – there's little he can do about the chin excluding any drastic measures, but it will have to do.

He might be on his last life, but he is still _alive_ , and he has never been more aware of this than now that he's _found_ her, somewhere, sometime, somehow against all odds, and this time, he isn't going to let anyone take her, as sure as he lives, and he _lives_ , he feels the blood burning in his veins, burning in his cheeks, he feels his breath speeding up at the slightest provocations, the bounce contained in his steps and more energy than he knows what do with, and so much light filling his soul from the inside that he finds himself tempted to erupt in song and dance.

Meanwhile, she has most certainly caught up to his continued presence outside her house, and right there is the problem: She has no idea who he is, she's acting like she's never seen him before, and he doesn't know what to do, not whenhe can barely contain his affection and his wonder at beholding her alive.

When he first saw the surprisingly proper young lady which met him at the door of that house, he first wondered if this wasn't all a big misunderstanding, if he wasn't forcing all this to be something it wasn't, but he recognized her, quite clearly, when she plucks that laptop from his hands.

It is highly secondary what she looks like or talks like, or what exactly her name is -

He found the person he was looking for right there -

She may be hidden behind a veneer of reluctance and propriety, a concession to sense and sensibility, but she is there, and so is her very own story, so is kindness and devotion for friends in need and a harbored dream not much unlike his own, and her own world of stories mysteries and melodies, and the hope that she might invite him inside.

…

She wants it to be _herself_ standing by his side, not just some shadow of anyone else.

…

Every second by her side feels like soaring, but every moment away from her is spent in brooding and torment.

The more he gets to know what an unique and peculiar person she is, the more impossible it seems that there could have been two of her.

Perhaps the monks were not wrong about his madness – what else could you call his frantic research, which yielded quite a lot of things, but nothing that could explain it?

He looks through pictures recording her life, first day at school, college graduation with a degree in English, social media posts from her college years showing her with a certain Nina and chronicling the ups and downs of past relationships.

He feels so light when he's around her, and he would love nothing more than to simply enjoy her presence, to be around her just as she is, but he cannot forget what he's seen, what led him to her in the first place even though it simply could not be.

He wonders how long it will be until he fails to conceal that other side of his, the doubt that eats away at him in every happy moment, the calculating, experimental mind burning for an answer in cold fury; The experience of past disappointments can't help but lead him to expect the worst, while his common sense keeps reminding him that she would be rather alarmed if she knew of all this, and how there is no guarantee at all that she'll never find out.

With Amy, Rory and River, there were many times where at least one of them was keeping something from the rest of them, and while the Ponds were all smarter than one might assume and quite capable of thinking for themselves, they had an underlying faith that he would somehow handle things particularly Amelia – with this new person by his side, things were different – much like himself, she could not simply let the question be, she could not help but notice and begin to put together the pieces and she had a need to know what was being played, never hesitating to point out a discrepancy not long after catching on to it. For one thing, she had certainly taken notice of his presence at her mother's funeral.

It's a contrast like night and day, like sunshine and sun clouds taking turns, and all of this at a time when he couldn't afford to slip up and didn't even really know if he could trust her yet – He had more reason than ever to keep a cool head, but he simply couldn't - he was finding this rather unlike himself and he didn't yet know if he liked this.

….

She must have been feeling much the same; Even so, he could glimpse the person he had met poking outside the edges of her carefully composed facade, or rather, he was watching the person she would become emerging from her chrysalis, she shapes of the future taking form behind the thinning veil of the present, albeit in unexpected ways, rising to meet him.

...

She makes him come back, makes him fit himself in her schedule, and he is too preoccupied to reaffirm that he does not normally listen to schedules.

He meant to invite her into his world, but instead, it seems that he has gotten swept up in hers, and the hopes, dreams and stories that dwell there; He comes to know its junctions and cornerstones and the influences that were important to her.

The reprimands of his better angels fall on deaf ears, blocked out by the melodies that circle through his thoughts, even the terrors of his nights have to make room for thoughts of her.

Sometimes, he takes his TARDIS and skips right ahead from one week to the next because he doesn't feel like waiting; But even when he doesn't skip ahead, anticipation seeps into everything he does, as he's tinkering around with the TARDIS console, when he's singing in the shower, or simply waltzing around an universe that had seemed so empty not too long ago;

Now, of course, he can't help but see new mysteries everywhere; Sometimes he mentions her tp the people he encounters, when he is in need of a personal story to break the ice and garner the locals' trust and ever so often, he takes note of particularly impressive places with the intention of bringing her later, if his TARDIS would be willing to play along -

He thinks of places to go, jokes to crack, particular bow ties to wear, and sometimes he outright brings gifts;

When they first met, _she_ was the one to take the initiative; She grabbed him by the hand and pulled him out of his stupor before he knew what's happening, and wouldn't have it any other way -

But due to the force of circumstance and the twisted turns of space-time, he wound up in this situation where one might easily conclude that he was a lot more interested in this than she was – not that this was the first time that his life as a time traveler had led to something of an awkward social life, but even then, it never led to him keeping appointments, bringing flowers and otherwise bending to the whims of the clock -

If he was nervous, his discomfort must stem from a different source, and it wasn't just the appointments -

She was pretty much making him court her like any other suitor might, stolen time machine and encyclopedic knowledge be damned. Instead of things happening despite his retinence, he was forced to act, even as the tension coursed through the body he believed to have mastered, and as the alrm bells in his mind rang in his figurative ears.

Very very bad idea.

It would be a bad idea under most other circumstances, but with the last heartbreak so fresh, and in this rare instance when he didn't even know if he could trust her-

It was madness.

But it was also the lone star of hope in the darkness of his universe.


End file.
